New Features Coming to Your Favorite Social Networks in 2016

January 26, 2016

Along with the New Year comes innovative features and tools across our favorite social networks. I fished around to find some of the most interesting and beneficial ideas that top platforms are currently testing. Although the following features have no official launch dates, you should definitely keep an eye out for them to roll out this year. Here’s what to watch for that will impact your social media marketing in 2016.

Coming Soon to Twitter

You know that extremely frustrating feeling when you’re required to cut down the characters on your flawlessly phrased Tweet? Luckily, Twitter is developing a new feature that enables users to publish tweets lengthier than the outdated 140-character limit. They are contemplating a 10,000-character limit!

Twitter is also currently developing an ad product that would be quite beneficial to brands (DigiDay). The product puts Tweets about the brand from users into ad campaigns across the platform. This new service will make it simpler for advertisers to gather relevant UGC and then promote the Tweets collected in ad campaigns. The notion of brands promoting everyday users is that they could be deemed as trusted voices across social media.

Coming Soon to Facebook

Facebook Messenger’s 2016 mission is to make the service “the best place to communicate with all the people and businesses in the world”(Facebook Newsroom). Last year, they introduced several new features and reached a milestone of 800 million users using the service each month. However, the company still believe there’s much more to come in the year ahead, and recently acquired evidence to support that. Information released by TechCrunch shows that Facebook has built a not-yet-released Facebook Messenger for Mac desktop application. Release of this app could make it easy for Facebook users to chat with one another on their computers. (Who knew it wasn’t easy enough already!)

Coming Soon to Instagram

Instagram is now testing a new feature that lets you know which followers are following you back. The following Tweet was included in an article by Tech Times that shows a screenshot of this new feature.

It’s about time! This feature has certainly been long awaited but it’s still in the testing phase, so try not to be upset if you don’t have access to the feature quite yet. The idea behind it is to restructure the application’s search function to give Instagrammers the most appropriate search results.

That isn’t all Instagram has been up to recently. Towards the end of last year, they were testing support for switching accounts directly in the app (TechCrunch). This feature would be very useful for marketers with multiple Instagram accounts. Currently, users are allowed to have multiple accounts but are required to logout and back in to access each account, which can be a huge inconvenience. It creates inefficiencies for social media marketers who manage accounts for more than one brand. If this potential feature sounds that appealing to you and you can’t wait for it to roll out, check out the Instwogram App, currently available for Androids. This app enables you to have two Instagram accounts open simultaneously from different apps installed on the same device. Pretty cool!

Emily holds a BFA in Design and Visual Communications from University of Arizona. She has worked with the Fandom Marketing team in San Diego to create social media graphics and content for a portfolio of brands.

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Brands With Fans is a social media marketing blog owned and operated by Fandom Marketing, a full service digital agency that's social. Get expert insights to integrate social marketing to your business and engage customers.